There is no denying it after everyone reads this post, and I am sure most people who know us have already figured it out. We have redneck in our blood, and it shines through in many ways. I wanted to share with you just for fun, how we made our homemade Redneck Smoked Salmon.
First thing you have to do is going fishing and catch your self some fresh Salmon out of the river. Next you have to clean your fish, and make a dry rub to put on it. Some people use a liquid brine, but I like the dry rub the best.
Dry rub Recipe:
four cups of dark brown sugar
1 cup kosher salt
15 cloves of garlic minced
Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl, and then lay some out on the bottom of a pan. I used a casserole pan. Lay the salmon skin side down on the mixture, and then put the rest of the mixture on top. I found that this recipe was enough for four medium size fillets. Let it sit in the fridge for 12 hours, I let it sit overnight. Before you put it in your smoker you have to rinse all the rub off of the fish, and be careful not to drop it because it is really slippery. The dry rub will turn into a brown slime. Could be a science experiment all in it self.
Now onto building the smoker. This is how we built ours: 1. Cut down about four maple saplings, make sure you do not drop them on a bee hive like Joshua did. Unless you want some more excitement in your life! 2. Strip the bark off of the saplings.3. Take the two straightest and set them aside to use later. 4. Cut the rest in one inch pieces and then cut the one inch pieces in half using a hatchet. Be careful not to cut any fingers off. 5. Put saw horses on each side of your fire pit. 6. Lay your two straight maple sticks between the sawhorses and nail them down to make them secure. 7. Take a metal grate (we used our bbq grate) and lay it on top of the maple sticks, directly above the fire. 8. Find all the pieces of plywood laying around your yard, and put them up against your sawhorses, leaving one side open to tend to your fire. 8. Make sure you check direction of the wind with your wet finger, so that you know what side to block with the plywood...the whole point being you don't want your smoke to blow away. 9. Build a fire using hardwood. (cherry, maple, apple) Let it burn until you have small flames then add your maple chips. 10. Put your salmon on the metal grate. 11. Since we used our bbq grate, we covered the salmon with the lid to the bbq. It worked great! 12. Keep tending the fire. You don't want it to hot, and you don't want it to go out. 13. Ours took between 6 and 8 hours to finish.
